Surveillance men describe tracking a drug cartel lawyer before his Southlake assassination

Juan Jesús Guerrero Chapa and his wife arrived at Southlake Town Square around 6 p.m. and parked across from a Yumilicious yogurt shop.

A GPS tracking device fixed to the undercarriage of their 2012 Range Rover had followed their movements for weeks.

Juan Jesús Guerrero Chapa

They went inside the yogurt shop and sat on a bench outside. They walked around. She bought shoes at Nine West.

Two men drove by in a rented car. They carefully selected a parking spot across from a small pond. It was important that they have a clear view of the Range Rover.

The couple returned to their vehicle. It was 6:47 p.m. on May 22, 2013. As Guerrero Chapa got into the passenger side, a white Toyota Sequoia stopped behind the Range Rover. A man got out. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and a scarf or bandanna over his nose and mouth.

He shot Guerrero Chapa several times through the closed car window with a 9mm handgun. Guerrero Chapa died at the scene.

Mexican drug cartel violence had arrived in Southlake, an affluent suburb that hadn’t recorded a homicide since 1999.

Guerrero Chapa had lived a dangerous double life. He was the personal attorney and emissary of former Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cárdenas Guillén. He also was an informant for the U.S. government.

As part of a plea deal Cárdenas made with prosecutors, Guerrero Chapa had transferred $50 million in assets to the U.S. government. The cash, helicopters and other items came from the Gulf cartel and its former paramilitary arm, the Zetas. The deal, along with his work as an informant, would have made him a target for many, including the Zetas.

Guerrero Chapa’s killers have not been apprehended. But the cartel surveillance men who allegedly tracked him down were arrested in 2014 as they tried to cross the border near McAllen. Two of the three defendants go on trial Monday in Fort Worth.

Through a spokesman, the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on the case. The U.S. attorneys in Dallas and Houston also declined.

The surveillance men described their roles to investigators after their arrests. They said the hit was not ordered by calculating drug lords for business reasons. Rather, they said, it was ordered by a bitterly angry son hellbent on avenging the death of his father.

A security camera image released by police shows a light-colored SUV believed to have been used in the killing of Guerrero Chapa at Southlake Town Square.

Ties to the Gulf cartel

On both sides of the border, Juan Jesús Guerrero Chapa crafted a public image of success and wealth as a legitimate lawyer and businessman. His veneer of respectability hid a violent trade in which loyalties shift amid secrets and lies, and death is a constant.

Little is publicly known about Guerrero Chapa’s early life in Mexico. He grew up in a middle-class family in the town of China, about 60 miles northeast of Monterrey. He owned a gas station in Nuevo León.

China, Nuevo León

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Nuevo León

China

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It’s unclear when Guerrero Chapa became involved in drug trafficking, but by 2001, he had drawn the attention of U.S. agents.

By then, Guerrero Chapa owned a ranch in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, where he raised chickens, pigs, horses and exotic Charolais bulls. His about.me page said he owned a company that supplied Charolais breeders, and he was known to donate meat from his farm to local restaurants. He also donated money to local churches, the website said.

But Guerrero Chapa also served as a key attorney for the Gulf cartel, which controlled drug traffic from northeastern Mexico into Texas and southeastern parts of the United States. His boss was Cárdenas, who ran the Gulf cartel and formed the Zetas as his paramilitary enforcers before he was captured in Mexico in 2003 and later extradited to the U.S.

U.S. agents considered Guerrero Chapa one of the “key individuals in the Gulf Drug Cartel who has contact with the highest-level of drug traffickers in Mexico,” according to information obtained by The Dallas Morning News. He also was involved in “trafficking his own drug loads.”

Osiel Cárdenas Guillén

U.S. authorities had targeted the cartel after Cárdenas threatened to kill an FBI agent and a DEA agent in 1999 in Matamoros.

Guerrero Chapa worked both sides of the law. After the U.S. took custody of Cárdenas in 2007, Guerrero Chapa became an informant, feeding U.S. agents critical cartel intelligence.

Because of his access, he was able to help coordinate arrests and forfeitures. He oversaw a $50 million forfeiture as part of the kingpin’s 2009 plea deal with the U.S. government, personally transporting money to U.S. agents in the trunk of a car.

The Zetas — who by then were doing their own drug trafficking and had grown into a full-fledged cartel — thought the millions they contributed for the forfeiture would help Cárdenas get out of jail or buy him leniency.

When they learned that Cárdenas was cooperating with the U.S., they felt betrayed by the Gulf cartel and Guerrero Chapa in particular. They declared war, and thousands were killed along the Mexican border in the ensuing gunbattles between the two groups. Many innocents were victims of “collateral damage.”

Cárdenas is serving a 25-year sentence in a federal prison in Colorado for drug trafficking, money laundering and threatening U.S. agents.

A friend of Guerrero Chapa’s who was a top associate in the Gulf cartel said the lawyer was in charge of all the casinos in Tamaulipas while Cárdenas was in prison and later played an even bigger role.

“He was key in generating the war between the Zetas and Gulf cartel,” the associate said.

The associate said Cárdenas paid Guerrero Chapa well and trusted his judgment.

“Juan was Osiel’s eyes and ears outside that prison,” the associate said.

By 2011, Guerrero Chapa had moved to Southlake. He lived with his wife, two sons and daughter in a $1.2 million house he bought for cash that July, using the name Ma G. Alheli Dias Teizeira, property records show. No other public records are associated with that name.

The home of Juan Jesús Guerrero Chapa in Southlake (Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

He allegedly continued his involvement in the drug trade. A defense attorney for one of the defendants in Guerrero Chapa’s killing claimed in court papers filed recently that Guerrero Chapa was the “de facto head” of the Gulf cartel who continued his “association with criminal enterprises” until his death.

Guerrero Chapa and his family members in the U.S. owned about 20 businesses between McAllen and South Florida, including tire and oil change shops, according to the defendants. Mexican newspapers reported that he also had investments in casinos in the U.S. and Mexico. Guerrero Chapa and his brother formed a South Texas gaming company in 2010, state corporation records show.

His wife and sister owned several businesses in the Southlake area. They declined to be interviewed for this story. His brother, who lived in South Florida, could not be reached.

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‘The cat’

As Guerrero Chapa and his family prospered in North Texas, a plot to kill him took shape.

The story, laid out by the surveillance men after their arrest, begins around 2000 at Guerrero Chapa’s ranch in Guanajuato.

After Cárdenas threatened the U.S. agents at gunpoint in Matamoros, he hid out at the ranch, Guerrero Chapa’s Gulf cartel associate said.

A low-level police officer known as a madrina got word that Cárdenas was there. The officer told Guerrero Chapa he would keep quiet if he were paid. When Guerrero Chapa told Cárdenas about the extortion attempt, his boss said he would take care of it.

The madrina was never heard from again.

But his son was. The madrina’s son, Rodolfo Villarreal Hernandez, is better known as “El Gato,” or “The Cat.” He told people he would seek revenge against his father’s killer, Guerrero Chapa’s cartel associate said.

“Problem is he [Gato] always thought Juan knew where the body was buried, or what happened to the body,” the associate said.

Gato, a former San Pedro Garza Garcia police officer and now a high-ranking member of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, hired two men in 2011 to find and track Guerrero Chapa, according to information The News obtained.

Jesús Gerardo Ledezma Cepeda and his son Jesús Gerardo Ledezma Campano Jr. were former police officers and members of a Mexican hit squad. Government officials have linked the father in recent court filings to at least nine other murders or disappearances in Mexico from 2011 to 2014.

Father and son specialized in surveillance work using high-tech GPS trackers and spy cameras.

A cousin also joined the surveillance team at the father’s request, according to information The News obtained. José Luis Cepeda Cortes searched U.S. public records on Guerrero Chapa and his family. He is a legal U.S. resident with a green card who lived in Edinburg.

Jesús Gerardo Ledezma Cepeda

Jesús Gerardo Ledezma Campano Jr.

José Luis Cepeda Cortes

Gato never mentioned Guerrero Chapa by name, the son told investigators. Gato instructed him to refer to the cartel attorney by a name that is offensive to homosexuals.

“Gato never wants to say the name of Juan,” the son said. “And if we call him Juan, he gets angry.”

Guerrero Chapa’s Gulf cartel associate said he warned his friend about Gato, but Guerrero Chapa responded he had nothing to do with the death and didn’t seem worried.

After Guerrero Chapa’s murder, a U.S. federal law enforcement bulletin said Gato had reportedly ordered it.

The Zetas may have been aware of El Gato’s intentions, said Arturo Fontes, a former FBI agent who tracked the cartels for more than a generation and is now president of Fontes International Solutions, a consulting firm. They and the Beltrán Leyva cartel had forged an alliance at the time to fight the rival Sinaloa cartel. And the Zetas saw Guerrero Chapa as a traitor for his involvement in the Cárdenas deal with the U.S. that was revealed in court records in 2010.

“On drug trafficking matters, Gato was considered a Zetas-Beltrán Leyva operative,” Fontes said. “In North Texas, it’s hard to imagine Gato doing anything related to drug trafficking without the knowledge of the Zetas.”

The hunt begins

The alleged surveillance men — father, son and cousin — spun out their story in their interrogations by federal agents.

The father said he told his son in 2012 that he had been hired to find Guerrero Chapa and needed his help. The two had previously worked together for Guerrero Chapa’s sister, who hired them to follow her estranged husband for an upcoming divorce, they said.

A drug trafficker named Luis Lauro Ramírez Bautista paid the father and son $38,000 for the effort between November 2012 and January 2013, U.S. prosecutors said in a March court filing.

Father and son started by using public records to research the family’s McAllen businesses.

In October 2012, the father traveled to Grapevine, where the Guerrero Chapa family owned property. The following month he went to South Florida, where Guerrero Chapa’s brother lived.

The men used multiple prepaid cellphones and changed rental cars often while they stalked Guerrero Chapa, according to court records.

“That person [Guerrero Chapa] went through a lot of trouble to make himself not easy to find,” a U.S. agent told one of the defendants. “He didn’t put anything in his name. He went through a lot…not to be found.”

The trackers were relentless. They researched police records to find details of Guerrero Chapa’s April 2011 arrest for battery at a Miami hotel for slapping his girlfriend. And they located his family members in Grapevine using property records.

Before returning home to Monterrey for Christmas, the son put GPS trackers on Guerrero Chapa’s brother’s vehicles.

The father returned the next month to South Florida, where he rented a house for several months to track Guerrero Chapa’s brother. But he wasn’t able to get any leads on Guerrero Chapa. He decided to return to Grapevine where Guerrero Chapa’s sister-in-law lived.

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In March, father and son put a tracker on her vehicle and rented an apartment. It was their “base of operations” for stalking Guerrero Chapa, according to search warrants.

At some point, the father removed the tracker from her car and returned to Mexico to use it in a different job, U.S. agents said in one of the interrogation videos. He placed it on a car belonging to the bodyguard of Eliseo Martínez Elizondo, a Mexican attorney whose body was found a few weeks later near Monterrey. He had been kidnapped and tortured.

Martínez Elizondo also was a U.S. informant who was involved in the casino business like Guerrero Chapa, Mexican newspapers reported.

A U.S. agent told the father, Ledezma Cepeda, that he must be very unlucky. Everyone whose cars had his trackers ended up dead, The News learned.

“These are not the only dead people who are in your email chain,” the agent said.

It was Gato who wanted Martínez Elizondo dead, the agent told the father.

Guerrero Chapa was aware of the killing. A photograph of Martínez Elizondo’s body was on Guerrero Chapa’s cellphone, according to information.

‘You guys did great work’

In Grapevine, father and son were able to find Guerrero Chapa’s vehicle at the DFW Lakes Hilton by following his sister-in-law. They took photos of it and placed a tracker underneath it. That led them to Guerrero Chapa’s home in Southlake.

They also put a tracking device on Guerrero Chapa’s Mercedes, which only he drove.

They set up game cameras — the kind used by hunters to track prey — near Guerrero Chapa’s driveway to capture cars coming and going. The cameras and others placed elsewhere in the neighborhood were camouflaged in green paint and had night vision and motion sensors. They were controlled remotely and programmed to send photos to the father’s cellphone in real time.

In the suspects’ emails, investigators found photos of people outside Guerrero Chapa’s home as well as his vehicles. One email had seven photos of him walking and getting into his Mercedes.

“You guys did great work,” a U.S. agent told them during questioning. “I have to say that we were all impressed with how sophisticated you guys are.”

The father and son said they met the hit men several times but didn’t know their names. One was a captain in the Mexican Army. The other was known as “Clorox.” They have not been publicly identified.

At least three others have been charged in sealed indictments in Dallas in connection with the case and remain fugitives.

A Texas police officer near the border helped the father and son look up vehicle registrations for Guerrero Chapa and his family, the son told agents after his arrest. The officer also helped them get court records about Guerrero Chapa’s Miami arrest, he said.

Shortly before his death, Guerrero Chapa was warned by phone that people who wanted to kill him had found him, prosecutors said. He feared for his life and told his wife not to use her phone, court records show.

“Juan didn’t take things seriously, but I told him these people had the resources and, more importantly, the will,” his friend and Gulf cartel associate said. “Gato had a personal vendetta and the Zetas felt betrayed. You don’t want to be in that position.”

‘They killed him!’

The day of the murder, Gato told the father to remain in the shopping center where he and his son had followed Guerrero Chapa.

Site of Chapa murder

Grapevine Lake

Southlake Town Square

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They were told the tracker wasn’t working and that they had to put eyes on Chapa. But it wasn’t true. The tracker was working.

They were suspicious. This wasn’t the way other jobs had gone.

Gato wanted confirmation of Guerrero Chapa’s death. And so they had to serve as spotters.

The son said his father told him to turn off his phone before the murder. From their parked car, the father watched Guerrero Chapa’s movements with binoculars.

He said his father had to make sure it was Guerrero Chapa before the hit.

The father turned off the tracker in his vehicle about 20 minutes before the murder, according to a federal search warrant.

The son said his father told him to buy some coffees so they didn’t look suspicious. When the son returned, his dad was panicked, saying: “They killed him! Let’s go, let’s go!”

Juan Jesús Guerrero Chapa lies slumped over in a Range Rover in Southlake Town Square.

“We weren’t expecting him to be hit there,” the son said. “We were expecting to get shot too.”

They quickly left.

Police response to the shooting

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U.S. agents did not believe that the duo didn’t know the hit was going down there.

After the murder, Gato wanted them to leave the U.S. and never return.

In Mexico, Gato took the two on a hunting trip. He gave Ledezma Cepeda a BMW and his son a Ford Bronco to show his appreciation, his son said.

He also told them Guerrero Chapa had killed his father about 10 years earlier.

When they were arrested at the border, the two had three trackers in their car, according to court records. A DEA agent asked the father about the device.

“We know people have asked you to locate people in various parts of this country,” he said. “If there is someone else who is in danger in this country, you need to tell us.”

The father said no one was in danger. He said he and his son tried to cross into the U.S. to shop for clothes.

He said he feared for his family’s lives and his own life while in prison.

“I’m a dead man,” the father told U.S. agents.

His son told the agents his father had lied to him about the job and that he would tell them everything that happened for a deal that included protection for his family, The News has learned.

He has made a plea deal with the government and is scheduled to be sentenced in August, court records show.

The son said even if he had known Guerrero Chapa would be killed, he would still have gone through with it. Otherwise, he and his family would be in danger.

“There’s no choice,” the son said. “You can’t hide from these people … you do what they tell you or you die.

“And you don’t die as a lethal injection … they rip you apart in pieces alive.”